Tribute to computing pioneer Jim Gray to be webcast Saturday

Jim Gray, one of computingâ''s greats, will be honored by his colleagues and family this Saturday morning (9 a.m. PDT) at a ceremony at the University of California at Berkeleyâ''s Zellerbach Hall and in a live webcast here. Gray, winner of the Association for Computing Machineryâ''s Turing Award in 1998 for his contributions to database and transaction processing, disappeared at sea in January of 2007. His disappearance, during a short solo sailing trip in good weather, remains a mystery, in spite of an exhaustive high tech search, in which countless volunteers examined thousands of satellite images looking for clues. The long hunt ended in May 2007.

Gray earned the first PhD in computer science ever awarded by the Univeristy of California at Berkeley back in 1969; he worked at Bell Labs, IBM, Tandem Computers, Digital Equipment Corp., and Microsoft, convincing the Redmond, Wash., giant to open a research center in San Francisco so he wouldnâ''t have to move. Researchers credit his work with enabling ATMs, ecommerce, online ticketing, and other database intensive services we take for granted today. In recent years, Gray focused on the effort to create a world-wide telescope and in building a digital library of the worldâ''s scientific literature. Read a recent interview in IEEE Distributed Systems Onlinehere.

At the tribute, sponsored by the IEEE Computer Society, the ACM, and UC Berkeley, Mike Olson, vice president of embedded technologies at Oracle, will talk about the search effort, computer science professor Mike Harrison will discuss Grayâ''s impact on Berkeley, and David Vaskevitch and Rich Rashid, Microsoft senior vice presidents, will describe Grayâ''s contributions to the computing industry.

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